Conceptual Understanding of High School Students on Plantae

Kingdom Plantae is a topic taught in Grade Tenth in Indonesia high school. The previous researchers have found misconceptions and difficulties in understanding the classification and the nomenclature system of Kingdom Plantae. Understanding basic concepts of Kingdom Plantae is important to study the more complex system of Plantae. This research was aimed to analyze the conceptual understanding of high school students on Plantae. The participants were 372 eleven graders who had studied Kingdom Plantae and selected randomly from eleven high schools in Surakarta, Indonesia. The diagnostic test four-tier consisting of 20 items. The instrument was to identify conceptual understanding. The instrument showed result on validity (mean = 1.00 and SD = 0.06) and reliability (0.46). The test showed that 10.5% students grouped as understand, and the rest varied as to False Negative (4.4%), False Positive (10.1%), Lack of Knowledge (45.6%), and Misconception (29.4%). Based on the results of the test, the students have misconceptions about monocots and dicots, the morphology of Anacardium occidentale, Musa sp., and Solanum tuberosum, classification of Anacardium occidentale. It was recommended to do detail examination of the reasons of low achievement in conceptual understanding of students

Qualitative Analysis of College Students' Ideas about the Earth: Interviews and Open-Ended Questionnaires

NOTE: This is a large file, 165.8 mb in size! This article describes a study in which students' conceptual understanding about the Earth was examined. In the study, students enrolled in introductory science courses at four institutions, completed open-ended questionnaires, and participated in interviews. The institutions consisted of a small private university, two large state schools, and one small public liberal arts college. Students were probed on a variety of topics related to the Earth's crust and interior, and to geologic time. Analysis of questionnaire and interview responses indicates that students hold a number of non-scientific ideas about the Earth. Additionally, students apply a range of ontological categories to geologic phenomena, with significant implications for teaching geosciences from a systems perspective. Educational levels: Graduate or professional, Graduate or professional

Comparing Two Types of Diagnostic Items to Evaluate Understanding of Heat and Temperature Concepts

The purpose of this research was to investigate an efficient method to assess year 8 (age 13-14) students' conceptual understanding of heat and temperature concepts. Two different types of instruments were used in this study: Type 1, consisting of multiple-choice items with open-ended justifications; and Type 2, consisting of two-tier multiple-choice items. Each of the instruments was administered to two separate cohorts of 173 and 143 year 8 students of similar achievement. The findings indicated that the students were better able to show their understanding in the two-tier multiple-choice items. Hence, based on this investigation, two-tier multiple-choice items may be more suitable for evaluating year 8 students' understanding of science concepts

Assessing concept possession as an explicit and social practice

We focus on issues of learning assessment from the point of view of an investigation of philosophical elements in teaching. We contend that assessment of concept possession at school based on ordinary multiple-choice tests might be ineffective because it overlooks aspects of human rationality illuminated by Robert Brandom’s inferentialism––the view that conceptual content largely coincides with the inferential role of linguistic expressions used in public discourse. More particularly, we argue that multiple-choice tests at schools might fail to accurately assess the possession of a concept or the lack of it, for they only check the written outputs of the pupils who take them, without detecting the inferences actually endorsed or used by them. We suggest that school tests would acquire reliability if they enabled pupils to make the reasons of their answers or the inferences they use explicit, so as to contribute to what Brandom calls the game of giving and asking for reasons. We explore the possibility to put this suggestion into practice by deploying two-tier multiple-choice tests

Using Concept Inventories to Measure Understanding

Measuring understanding is notoriously difficult. Indeed, in formulating learning outcomes the word “understanding” is usually avoided, but in the sciences, developing understanding is one of the main aims of instruction. Scientific knowledge is factual, having been tested against empirical observation and experimentation, but knowledge of facts alone is not enough. There are also models and theories containing complex ideas and inter-relationships that must be understood, and considerable attention has been devoted across a range of scientific disciplines to measuring understanding. This case study will focus on one of the main tools employed: the concept inventory and in particular the Force Concept Inventory. The success of concept inventories in physics has spawned concept inventories in chemistry, biology, astronomy, materials science and maths, to name a few. We focus here on the FCI, ask how useful concept inventories are for evaluating learning gains. Finally, we report on recent work by the authors to extend conceptual testing beyond the multiple-choice format

Retention in Mathematics students: problems and possible approaches.

This article describes and analyses the approach adopted by the Mathematics course team in UCLan to improve retention in the first year mathematics students. After introducing the key aspects of the skills required by a mathematics student and the teaching methods considered in the past to improve such skills, the UCLan method is outlined. Such method is based on a mixture of formative and summative assignments, spread throughout the year. A case study allows to statistically confirm the effectiveness of such method. We conclude the article outlining possible improvements and drawbacks

Early chemistry misconceptions: status and implications for science education in Ethiopia

Misconceptions towards basic chemistry concepts have been identified at all level of chemistry education in recent studies. Such set of early misconceptions about very basic chemistry concepts were even found to be reflected by pre service and experienced in-service teachers. This implies that numerous set of chemical misconceptions kept cycling in the entire educational system. As a result, the entire science educational system is being blamed of producing learners with numerous misconceptions and low conceptual understanding. In fact, the alarmingly declining students’ performance in regional and national examination in Ethiopia (NOE, 2010), for example, could be an indicator of this situation. Moreover, such quality threatening issues are not getting fair stakeholders’ emphasis especially in Ethiopia. It was aimed, therefore, to discuss the status of early misconceptions and its implications

A Four-tier Test to Identify Students’ Conceptions in Inheritance Concepts

Identification of students' conceptions is an important step before developing suitable learning methods to improve students' understanding. One of the best way to identify students’ conception is the use of diagnostic test. Therefore, the development of diagnostic tests were important in the teaching and learning process to help the teacher determine the students’ conceptions, wheater they have scientific conceptions, lack of knowledge, or misconception. The aim of this research is to develop a valid and reliable four-tier diagnostic test to identify students’ conceptions in inheritance. The research method consists of three main stages: define content, obtaine information about students’ conception, and develop the four-tier test. The result from the research demonstrated that the four-tier test that was developed, was valid and reliable instrument in diagnosing students’ conception in inheritance concepts

"Trees live on soil and sunshine!" : Coexistence of scientific and alternative conception of tree assimilation

Successful learning is the integration of new knowledge into existing schemes, leading to an integrated and correct scientific conception. By contrast, the co-existence of scientific and alternative conceptions may indicate a fragmented knowledge profile. Every learner is unique and thus carries an individual set of preconceptions before classroom engagement due to prior experiences. Hence, instructors and teachers have to consider the heterogeneous knowledge profiles of their class when teaching. However, determinants of fragmented knowledge profiles are not well understood yet, which may hamper a development of adapted teaching schemes. We used a questionnaire-based approach to assess conceptual knowledge of tree assimilation and wood synthesis surveying 885 students of four educational levels: 6th graders, 10th graders, natural science freshmen and other academic studies freshmen. We analysed the influence of learner's characteristics such as educational level, age and sex on the coexistence of scientific and alternative conceptions. Within all subsamples well-known alternative conceptions regarding tree assimilation and wood synthesis coexisted with correct scientific ones. For example, students describe trees to be living on "soil and sunshine", representing scientific knowledge of photosynthesis mingled with an alternative conception of trees eating like animals. Fragmented knowledge profiles occurred in all subsamples, but our models showed that improved education and age foster knowledge integration. Sex had almost no influence on the existing scientific conceptions and evolution of knowledge integration. Consequently, complex biological issues such as tree assimilation and wood synthesis need specific support e.g. through repeated learning units in class- and seminar-rooms in order to help especially young students to handle and overcome common alternative conceptions and appropriately integrate scientific conceptions into their knowledge profile

A diagnostic assessment of eighth grade students’ and their teachers’ misconceptions about basic chemical concepts

Even though many students at all levels struggle to learn chemistry and feel its exact essence, they are often unsuccessful. In this regard, most studies identified that the key cause of such failure to succeed especially in post primary and college education is formations of misconceptions towards basic chemistry/science concepts from the very beginning in primary education. However, what these studies couldn’t exactly figure out is all about the possible source and cause of such misconceptions. Hence, in this study, it was aimed to diagnose both teachers’ and students’ misconceptions about five basic chemistry concepts (particulate nature of matter, physical state of matter, distinguishing differences of chemical and physical changes, phase changes and stoichiometry) and to examine the relevance and consistency of areas and intensity of students’ misconceptions with that of their teachers. As a result, a survey research method comprising of multi-tier chemistry misconception test (MTCMT) and an interview as data gathering instruments were employed by which eighth grade students and chemistry/science teachers from four second cycle primary schools found in Mettu Administrative Town were purposely selected as target populations. In the mean time, the MTCMT was  administered for 64 students and 4 teachers as a pilot test, for 192 students and 6 teachers as a final version, and 32 students were finally interviewed to get detail information on their existing conception. As a result, many set of suspected and new misconceptions were found, and finally from the Pearson’s correlation, it was found that 90% of students’ misconceptions has a significant correlation with teachers misconceptions implying that teachers are responsible for most (90%) of their students’ misconceptions.[AJCE, 3(1), January 2013